 - New York, 2 January:
 Sometimes cinema acts as a mirror, reflecting the changing mood of society. Nowhere is this more evident than in contemporary America where the success of Ted Kotcheff's First Blood and John Milius' Conan the Barbarian has created a new race of heroes for a nation drained of confidence by defeat in Vietnam, undermined by economic problems and humiliated by terrorists and drug barons. In First Blood, Sylvester Stallone plays John Rambo, a Vietnam veteran who goes to war with the society that has marginalized him. But instead of a martyr, Kotcheff gives us an invincible superman. In Conan the Barbarian, the former Mr. Universe Arnold Schwarzenegger lets his pectorals do the talking in a sword and sorcery epic in which he wields a mean broadsword and bites the head off a vulture. Rambo and Conan are latterday Hercules, who battle not for Good but simply for survival.
- Lisbon, 2 January: Paulo Rocha is presenting one of the country's most extravagant cinema productions, A Ilha dos Amores. It is an astonishing vision of Portuguese history, seen through the life of a colonial officer at the end of the 19th century.
- Los Angeles, 2 January: The district attorney's report on the inquiry into the death of Marilyn Monroe 20 years ago clearly refutes the allegations that the star was murdered. It confirms the diagnosis of forensic experts at the time: Monroe died of a heart attack due to an overdoes of barbiturates.
- Hollywood, 3 January: Sherry Lansing, who resigned from the presidency of 20th Century-Fox on 21 December, is forming an independent production company in partnership with Stanley R. Jaffe. They have signed a five-year exclusive rights agreement with Paramount.
- London, 11 January:
 This year marks the British Film Institute's jubilee. Two royal performances are being planned for the occasion. The Institute not only runs a large reference library and one of the world's most comprehensive film archives, but also boasts a distribution division for hard-to-handle titles, runs a number of movie houses across the country and produces films, including this year's The Draughtsman's Contract.
- Paris, 11 January: The Minister for Culture Jack Lang's new measures for the cinema have been hailed as the most important reforms in the history of the industry here. The main points are as follows: the creation of a financial institute to guarantee bank loans, the doubling of advances on box-office receipts, a support system for the small distributors and exhibitors, and the creation of an agency to distribute short films.
- Paris, 12 January:
 The recent Louis Delluc Prize winner, Danton, is the first French film to be directed by Andrzej Wajda. It takes as its subject the clash between the warmly idealistic Danton and the coldly pragmatic Robespierre over the direction the French Revolution should take, and ends with Danton on the guillotine. Most critics have made an analogy between the central ideological conflict and that of General Jaruzelski and Lech Walesa in today's Poland, although the film is based on a 1931 play by Stanislawa Przybyszewska. Gérard Depardieu does not play Danton as an opportunist, as is usually the case, but a sincere man, one of the first to oppose the Terror.
- Paris, 20 January: French film stars have decided to strike in protest at a new law restricting film actors and technicians' right to collect unemployment.
 - Avoriaz, 23 January: Muppet creator Jim Henson, with Frank Oz (the voice of Miss Piggy among others), has explored new territory in Dark Crystal, the winner of the Grand Prix at this festival of the fantastic. The film is a technically superb venture into fantasy, whose simple message -- that good triumphs over evil -- is imaginatively conveyed. The jury's special prize went to Le Dernier combat (The Last Battle), a first feature by 23-year-old Luc Besson, an impressive fable of survival in stark black-and-white images, with no dialogue at all.
- New York, 18 February:
 Jerry Lewis' career has been on the skids since his abandonment, in 1972, of The Day the Clown Cried. The title of his last movie, Hardly Working, was an ironic commentary on the backwater into which he had bobbed. But now Lewis is threatening a revival in Martin Scorsese's bleak anti-comedy King of Comedy. He's cast as the ferociously grumpy TV talk show host Jerry Langford, who is kidnapped by besotted fan Sandra Bernhard and Robert De Niro's would-be comic and ultimate schmuck Rupert Pupkin. But, as Rupert observes, it's better to be "a king for a night than a schmuck for a lifetime," and by the close of the film it's Rupert whose star is rising. Even when gagged and immobilized by swathes of white adhesive tape, Lewis radiates a sour malevolence that makes Jerry Langford one of the most memorably unpleasant characters in films of recent years. And there is a certain irony in the link between this storyline and Lewis' own The Patsy (1964), in which he is groomed to replace a dead comic.
 - Paris, 27 February: The eighth César award ceremony, hosted by Catherine Deneuve, was held at the Rex on the picture palace's 50th birthday. It was La Balance, by Bob Swaim, an American director resident in Paris, that was voted the best picture of 1982. In addition, the two leads of this exciting police thriller, Philippe Léotard and Nathalie Baye, took the best acting awards. Léotard plays a petty crook coerced by the police to turn informer -- "la balance" in underworld parlance -- using his relationship with a prostitute (Baye) to nail a gang boss. Andrzej Wajda was best director for Danton, and Blake Edwards's popular Victor/Victoria with his wife Julie Andrews, was the best foreign film. Two new awards were initiated this year for the most promising actor and actress. These went to Christophe Malavoy in Family Rock, and to Sophie Marceau in La Boum II. Finally, an homage was paid to the actress Arletty, who greeted the audience on a screen from her Paris apartment.
- Berlin, 1 March: The Festival's Golden Bear has gone to the British film Ascendancy, with Julie Covington and Ian Charleson. Actress Jeanne Moreau presided over this year's ceremony.
- Paris, 13 March: The first public screening of André Antoine's L'Hirondelle et la mésange has taken place at the Chaillor Cinémathèque. It was screened for a few people in 1924 but was never exploited commercially. The rushes which came to light in 1982 were used to restore the film.
- Paris, 6 April:
 Having made a nostalgic journey to her own 1960s adolescence in her first two charming films, the talented Diane Kurys reverts to the 50s with Coup de foudre (aka Entre nous or At First Sight). Green-eyed Isabelle Huppert and dark-eyed Miou-Miou take center stage as two women whose passionate friendship leads them to leave their inadequate husbands and open a dress shop together. Set in Lyons, the tender, atmospheric and well-acted tale is drawn from the experience of the director's mother (played by Huppert).
- Bombay, 11 April: Gandhi has become the hottest ever foreign film at the box office both here in Bombay and in New Delhi. It is also the first European film to prove as popular as Indian films.
 - Los Angeles, 11 April: The most successful picture at this year's Oscar® ceremony was Gandhi, which won eight awards, including Best Picture, Best Director for Richard Attenborough and Best Actor for Ben Kingsley in the title role. Meryl Streep was voted Best Actress for Sophie's Choice. Louis Gossett Jr. won the Best Supporting Actor award as the drill sergeant in An Officer and a Gentleman and Jessica Lange was Best Supporting Actress for Tootsie, all of which left the spectacularly successful E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial surprisingly out in the cold.
- Hollywood, 13 April: George Cukor's A Star Is Born is undergoing extensive reconstruction after the discovery of approximately 20 minutes of footage, including two unseen numbers by Judy Garland "Lost That Long Face" and "Here's What I'm Here For." Film historian Ron Haver was instrumental in the tracking down of the missing Star segments, omitted when Jack L. Warner ordered the 1954 original to be shortened.
- Hollywood, 26 April: United Artists Classics have rescued five "lost" Three Stooges films from the MGM vaults. Two of the five shorts, made at MGM prior to the trio's Columbia contract, use the Technicolor two-component system. The shorts, which are being released as part of an MGM Three Stooges Festival, have not been shown since the 1930s.
 - Cannes, 19 May:
 With his first picture in six years, L'Argent, 76-year-old Robert Bresson has divided the public at the Cannes Film Festival into two distinct camps. British director Alan Parker stated: "This is the work of an old man. It's unbearably boring." However, François Truffaut regretted that certain people failed to respond to Bresson's poetry. Another cause for chatter along the Croisette was that Caroline Lang, the daughter of the Minister of Culture Jack Lang, had an important role in the film. Whatever the reactions to L'Argent, Bresson has remained true to his austere vision in this updating of a Tolstoy story about a young man who passes a forged bank note in a photographer's shop, an action that leads him into theft and murder. The film shared the Grand Prize with Nostalgia, Andrei Tarkovsky's obscure, melancholy and poetic Italian-made drama. Then, some hours before the winners were announced, a Japanese journalist told his colleagues that he had been informed that the Golden Palm was to be given to Nagisa Oshima's Furyo. But it was another Japanese film that gained the top prize -- Shohei Imamua's The Ballad of Narayama, a powerful remake of Kinoshita's 1958 vision of cruelty in a primitive society. Set in a remote mountain village, it tells of the custom of abandonment of anyone over 70 on the top of Mount Narayama. In contrast to the earnest films at the Festival, the Special Jury Prize was won by the British comedy Monty Pyton's The Meaning of Life.
- Hollywood, 24 May: Fay Wray has been invited to chair a special tribute to mark the 50th anniversary of the release of King Kong on 26 May. A screening of the film will be followed by a reception at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel where a collection of Kong memorabilia will be on display.
- Los Angeles, 25 May: Releas of George Lucas' Return of the Jedi, the third film in the Star Wars saga, directed this time by Richard Marquand.
- London, 31 May: A London court has awarded Universal Pictures $6,620,768 agains a London pirate lab and distribution network. It is the highest amount awarded anywhere in the motion picture industry's five-year fight against video piracy.
- New York, 8 June:
 Black comedian Eddie Murphy, who made an impactful debut in 48 HRS. last year, is back in Trading Places, made by John Landis for Paramount, who have reason to expect great things from it at the box office. The intriguing premise concerns two wealthy old codgers (veterans Don Ameche and Ralph Bellamy) locked in an argument over environment vs. heredity. Finally, they agree on a wager to put the case to the test by picking a conman beggar (Murphy) off the streets and training him to be a socially acceptable commodities broker, at the same time throwing their bright incumbent (Dan Aykroyd) onto the streets. Murphy, managing to be streetwise and charming all at once, is a delight, but the film has much more to offer. Witty and engaging, it is a welcome throwback to comedy of the past. The screwball goings-on are wrapped in satire remniscent of Preston Sturges, though there is much of Capra's corn and good nature. The cast, including Jamie Lee Curtis as a delightful hooker, play it for all its worth. Director Landis, whose previous movies include National Lampoon's Animal House, The Blues Brothers and last year's terrific An American Werewolf in London, proves his versatility as well as his expertise.
 - Mexico, 30 June: Luis Buñuel, perhaps the most mordantly comic and subversive of all the great film directors, has died aged 83. Appropriately born (in Spain) with the century, he came from a cultured bourgeois family and was educated at a Jesuit school. This background and education turned Buñuel into a consistently anti-middle class and anti-clerical director. In Paris, he came under the influence of André Breton's Surrealist Manifesto, a vision from which he never wavered. With Salvador Dali, Buñuel embarked on his film career with one of the most startling images in all cinema, an open eye being slashed with a razor at the beginning of Un chien andalou in 1928.
- Paris, 22 July:
 Just 56 years after the 1927 Paris premiere of Abel Gance's Napoléon, the film has made a triumphant return in front of 3,700 spectators, accompanied by an orchestra conducted by Carl Davis, who assembled the new score. The sage of the film's reconstruction by English film historian and director Kevin Brownlow began in the mid-1960s when he completed a short documentary about Gance, The Charm of Dynamite. Shown by the BBC in June 1968, it stimulated renewed interest in the director and his work. A reconstructed Napoléon was shown at London's National Film Theatre in 1970, and a more complete version with the final triptych was screened at Colorado's Telluride Film Festival nine years later. The 89-year-old Gance, present at the event, later remarked that the occasion was as good as the Paris Opera premiere.
 - Paris, 1 September: Praised by the critics at Cannes this year, the first Australian picture to be wholly financed by a major American studio (MGM), The Year of Living Dangerously, has had a box-office success hitherto rarely achieved by a film from Down Under. The year of the title is 1965 in Indonesia (it was shot on location in the Philippines), leading up to the events of 30 September, when the dictatorial President Sukarno was deposed in a military coup. Living dangerously are Mel Gibson, a rookie Aussie foreign correspondent, Sigourney Weaver, attaché at the British embassy, with whom he falls in love, and a dwarfish Chinese-American cameraman, unusually and triumphantly played by Linda Hunt in a male role. It was directed with great virtuosity by Peter Weir, who vividly captures the tense atmosphere of the public happenings as a background to a love story in the best traditions of Hollywood romance in exotic climes. Gibson, who was discovered in George Miller's Mad Max (1979), the only previous Australian movie to make such a commercial impact, has now become an international star. Weir first came to the fore with Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), the most important film of Australia's New Wave. Other directors who have made an impact are Bruce Beresford (The Getting of Wisdom, 1978; Breaker Morant, 1980); Philip Noyce (Newsfront, 1978; Heatwave, 1981); and Paul Cox, who first gained attention with his off-beat romance Lonely Hearts in 1981.
- Venice, 11 September:
 Whenever the films of Jean-Luc Godard are shown, they create controversy, so it was no surprise that there was grumbling from some quarters when Prenom Carmen (First Name Carmen) won not only the Golden Lion, but also a technical award for the cinematography of Raoul Coutard. This is Godard at his most mischievous, playing wittily with a B-movie plot, Mérimée's Carmen and notions of cinema. Euzhan Palcy's first feature, the entrancing Rue cases nègres (Black Shack Alley), set in Martinique, took the Silver Lion.
 - New York, 29 September: In Lawrence Kasdan's The Big Chill, a group of Sixties radicals is reunited for the funeral of a college friend who has committed suicide. Over the course of the weekend they review the ways they have had to change, share confidences and regrets, and swap snappily cynical aphorisms. Kasdan has assembled a brilliant ensemble (William Hurt, Kevin Kline, Glenn Close, Tom Berenger, Jeff Goldblum, Meg Tilly, JoBeth Williams and Mary Kay Place) in a reflective movie that benefits greatly from an evocative soundtrack and explores, with wit and warmth, similar territory to John Sayles' The Return of the Secaucus Seven.
- New York, 2 October: Diane Kurys' French film Coup de foudre (aka Entre nous or At First Sight) was a triumphant success at the New York Film Festival. The filmmaker was given a standing ovation.
- New York, 9 October:
 After the monumental failure of One from the Heart last year, Francis Ford Coppola has made two films on a much smaller scale. The Outsiders and Rumble Fish were shot back-to-back in Tulsa, both based on novels of adolescence by S. E. Hinton. The latter, filmed in monochrome, with intermittent use of color, tells of a gang leader (Mickey Rourke) idolized by his kid brother (Matt Dillon), who cannot see the damage done to him by violence. The Outsiders is about a group of young men from the wrong side of the tracks. Both films shine with promising, new young stars.
 - New York, 21 October: Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, the best-selling account of the early days of the U.S. space program, has been turned by Philip Kaufman into an intriguingly off-beat celebration of the Mercury astronauts and laid-back, legendary test pilot Chuck Yeager, played by Sam Shepard, who blazed the trail for them. The Mercury astronauts are played by Scott Glenn, Scott Paulin, Charles Frank, Fred Ward, Lance Henriksen, Dennis Quaid and Ed Harris. Skillfully interweaving Yeager's intensely individualistic approach with the group dynamics of the Mercury team, Kaufman vividly shows us the "right stuff" is more than juat a metaphor for machismo.
- Paris, 25 October: During a press conference, the Minister of Communication, Georges Filloud, announced the creation of a new pay-channel, Canal Plus, before the end of 1984. Forty percent of viewing time is to be devoted to feature films.
- Los Angeles, 9 November: Brian De Palma's Scarface, which was given an X-rating by the MPAA's Classfication and Rating Administration on 3 November on the basis of excessive violence, has won an appeal and is now rated R.
- Los Angeles, 18 November:
 Barbra Streisand makes an ambitious directing debut (also co-writer and producer) with Yentl. Filmed in Czechoslovakia and London, it came in over budget at $17.5 million. The result is questionable, but there's plenty to please Streisand's fans in Isaac Bashevis Singer's tale (turned into a musical) of a Jewish girl in Poland who masquerades as a boy in order to attend the rabbinical seminary, and finds herself married to her fellow student's fiancée! Mandy Patinkin and Amy Irving lend sterling support.
 - Hollywood, 24 November: The strong pairing of Jack Nicholson and Shirley MacLaine provides lashings of humor and heartache in Terms of Endearment, produced, written and directed by James L. Brooks from a novel by Larry McMurtry. In his feature film directing debut, TV series wizard Brooks has fashioned a superior soaper that tracks the relationship between eccentric widow MacLaine and her feisty daughter Debra Winger. Nicholson plays MacLaine's ex-astronaut neighbor Garrett Breedlove, a man whose waistline is expanding as fast as his horizons seem to be receding. The movie is woven around his developing affair with MacLaine and the diagnosis of cancer in Winger, a combination of sentimentality and seriousness that, it must be said, produces its fair share of mawkish moments but also manages to draw high-definition performances from the principals which are bound to attract attention when the Oscars® come around. The fact that MacLaine and Winger were barely on speaking terms during filming is not discernible in the finished product. Brooks cut his teeth in TV on hits like "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and "Taxi" before moving into feature films as the screenwriter on Starting Over, a wistful comedy starring Burt Reynolds and Jill Clayburgh.
 - Paris, 25 November:
 The celebrated film historian Lotte H. Eisner has died aged 87. Born in Germany, where she studied the history of art and archeology, Eisner fled to Paris in 1933 at the rise of Nazism. There she worked as a correspondent for World Film News and other publications. In 1945, she joined the Cinémathèque Française, working closely with Henri Langlois programming festivals, lectures and exhibitions. She held the post of Head Curator of the Cinémathèque until 1975. Eisner was an expert on Expressionism in German cinema, and her 1952 book on the subject L'Ecran démonique (translated into English as The Haunted Screen in 1969), was extremely influential. Aside from her contributions to film magazines, she also wrote a study of F. W. Murnau, and a large-scale work on the films of her old friend Fritz Lang.
- London, 9 December: Samuel Fuller's controversial 1981 thriller, White Dog, has been making a lot of noise at the London Film Festival. A little-seen film, suppressed by Paramount studio executives and never released theatrically in the U.S., this drama is a powerful saga about racism. Julie Sawyer (Kristy McNichol) hits a handsome white dog with her car one night and then nurses it back to health. One day, the theretofore mild-mannered dog saves her life by viciously attacking and killing a rapist who breaks into her home. Lucy discovers that the dog has been trained to attack black skin. She consults an animal trainer, Carruthers (Burl Ives), who urges her to have the dog exterminated. But a maverick black trainer, Keys (Paul Winfield), who has tried before to break the training of such dogs but never succeeded, steps in. Director Fuller had made other controversial films, but this one frightened studio executives, who deep-sixed it. (Michael Betzold, All Movie Guide) The London Times' rave reviews have classified it "a virtuoso thriller..." and "clearly anti-racist." The British theatrical release for the movie is scheduled for March.
- Los Angeles, 9 December:
 Brian De Palma has remade the Howard Hawks gangster classic Scarface, turning Paul Muni's Capone-like mobster into Al Pacino's Cuban cocaine dealer Tony Montana. Part of the jetsam of Castro's Cuba, Pacino moves steadily toward the center of power in the world of South Florida's drug-trafficking but, like Muni, he is undone be the obsessively protective attitude he has toward his sister. Eventually he is destroyed, not be the forces of law and order, but by an even more ruthlessly efficient crime syndicate. Pacino gives a performance of hysterical malevolence in a movie which, perhaps, owes as much to The Godfather as to the Hawks original, and Michelle Pfeiffer is outstanding as his blonde junkie wife Elvira, symbol of the WASP bastions of power Montana wants to annex.
 - Chicago, 14 December: Having seen his film career come to halt eight years ago with The Fortune, Mike Nichols has hit the comeback trail with Silkwood. It's based on the real story of whistle-blowing nuclear worker Karen Silkwood, who died in 1974 under the mysterious circumstances of a "one-car accident." Here, Meryl Streep immerses herself in the part of Silkwood, a gum-chewing miniskirted working girl who finds herself on a mission to expose the dangers of nuclear power and begins to suspect that her employers are out to get her. Her involvement with the union and with union organizer Ron Silver recalls Sally Field in Norma Rae. There are strong supporting performances from Cher in the role of Karen's lesbian lodger and passionately devoted friend Dolly Pelliker, and Kurt Russell as her lover.
- New York, 16 December: Showtime, the pay-cable channel that has the most subscribers after Home Box Office, has just paid $500 million for five years' exclusive rights to all Paramount pictures.
- Moscow, 19 December: Grigori Aleksandrov, longtime associate of the celebrated Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, died today. Alexandrov co-directed such classic works as Oktober (1928) and The General Line (1929) before striking out on his own. He gained critical acclaim abroat for films of the ilk of Meeting on the Elbe (1949).
- Los Angeles, 20 December: 20th Century-Fox has launched an advertising campaign to attract potential advertisers who wish to see their brand names displayed prominently within the studio's feature films. Fox is the first big studio to openly use this method of generating revenue.
- Rome, 23 December: Release here of Federico Fellini's latest film, E la nave va (And the Ship Sails On), made with several British actors in the cast.
- India, 31 December: During the last year, 741 films were produced in 27 different languages for the domestic market. The production center for popular films is the city of Bombay.
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23 January - Los Angeles, 
1 July - Beverly Hills, Los Angeles,